


Caulescent

by fenfare



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Animal Death, Birds, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Mild Gore, Nature, Slow Burn, Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:47:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26382880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fenfare/pseuds/fenfare
Summary: Madara is not at peace after the war. Nor is he entirely human.(And after all this time, he and Hashirama are still the same.)
Relationships: Senju Hashirama/Uchiha Madara
Comments: 26
Kudos: 100





	1. Hawk I

**Author's Note:**

> hello and welcome to the most ambitious project that I have ever attempted solo!! 
> 
> I will have loads more notes at the end of this fic, including what is now shaping up to be an entire afterword comprised of the various things that inspired it (yes, I am a pretentious bastard). but for now, sit back and enjoy the sweet, sweet slow burn.

I.

Madara’s fists clench against the wood floor. It all hurts. Of all things, he remembers the hawk from long ago. He remembers being seven and scabby-kneed and barefoot and muddy, sprinting down the hill towards the encampment after Takeda and the rest of the adults. They had carried her big wooden box between them with a fearful reverence, a combination of terror and awe, and Madara had watched them from the tall grass and knew that he had to know the box’s contents, had to see what Takeda was so afraid of that had stopped him spitting his usual vitriol. He followed them into the tent. The air was stale inside; the grass was wilted and brittle. He crouched in the shadows by the tent flap, breath paused in his lungs, staring up through a thicket of legs at the box on the table. The air felt heavy. A storm was coming. Then Takeda slowly slid one gloved hand inside, his fingers trembling, and pulled out the hawk.

The air left the tent.

She refused to exit the box without a fight. The adults around the table seemed to shrink back from her furious wings, and Madara watched Takeda’s hand shake from her immense weight as he lifted her slowly, slowly into the gloom of the tent. She was handsome and muscled and massive, a great gunmetal gray beast of a bird, with a splash of unexpected yellow around her nostrils and talons. And she was  _ beautiful. _

Madara hugged his knees to his chest. He could not look away. She dipped her head for a moment, bobbing on Takeda’s hand. Then she snapped her beak once, twice, and looked straight at him. The breath vanished from Madara’s lungs. He saw universes and contradictions. She was spectral, yet broad-chested; fearsome, yet she gazed straight at him nearly imploringly with those bulbous eyes—and they were red, red, redder than the sunset over the ocean.  _ Get me out, _ those eyes said to him.  _ I must fly. _

Something occurred to him then. They had trapped her here in the tent, but she had them trapped too. She was a gray whirlwind in a bird’s body—the harbinger of a steely stalemate. She made him afraid, and not many things could.

But Madara had always chased after the things that frightened him. From then on, the hawk was inevitable.

* * *

II.

Madara’s fists clench against the wood floor. Splinters prick in his palms and his knuckles and his knees. His knees ache like hell; his throat is torn from screaming. His chest feels close to collapse, and blood leaks from beneath his nails. Izuna died in this room. His mouth pops open in a perfect round red O as he remembers. Why had he thought of the hawk? Of all the things to remember on Izuna’s deathbed. They had captured her for hunting but she had refused to abandon her wildness even for a second. It was as if, when she took off from Takeda’s glove on that third morning, she had pierced a hole in the cold mountain air and simply slipped through it and out of sight.

Takeda has defected now, along with his three grandsons. He, too, has slipped away. The clan will dwindle into nothing before Madara dares to face them.

Izuna lies there, spirit-gray. The air feels heavy. A storm is coming. 

He sees his reflection as he lifts his head up from the mat where Izuna’s body lies. He’s gaunt and hollow and haggard, with deep crescents under his eyes. For a second he’s afraid of what he sees in the mirror. He thinks he might be a ghost—or something else. The humidity presses against him; his body feels foreign; heavy but feather-light at the same time.  _ Get me out. _

And—

_ (The wood floor—) _

The floor swerves at him again. 

_ (I must fly—) _

* * *

III.

Madara’s fists clench against the wood floor. His hands are white hot. Then the thing explodes from his back in a pulse of angry chakra. He feels his cells boiling as it unfurls, blossoming like a great fiery blue flower between his shoulder blades, and he hears the distant sound of Izuna’s bedroom shattering to pieces in a shower of wooden splinters. A pair of massive white-hot hands thud onto the floorboards; great talonlike claws puncture the wood, and as the thing reaches full height it seethes with anger and grief. It almost sings, smoldering like a phantom, and the ribcage that snaps into place around him is burning with a heat so intense that he feels his eyelashes turn to ash as he blinks Izuna’s eyes.

The usual eavesdroppers at Izuna’s door reel back from the burning wood, falling over themselves in a shocked huddle. A pair of them scuttle back like a pair of exposed cockroaches as a flaming piece of the door frame descends into the ruined hallway. It all seems to happen so slowly.

Madara looks up at all the onlookers. _ Get me out. _ One of them pulls his shaken companion to his feet and they both run from him as he watches. The massive talons clench and unclench; a shiver passes through the enormous wings.

A hundred shards of Izuna’s mirror lay at his feet. He sees a hundred of his reflection as his eyes meet the floor once again, and he doesn’t recognize the face that he sees. What he sees is not human—all horns and wings and long canines and scales made of blue fire.

The air feels heavy. A storm is coming.

“Follow me or don’t,” Madara says to the few Uchiha who remain. The Susano’o flares around him. “I am going into battle.”

* * *

IV.

Madara’s hand clenches on Hashirama’s knife. Every pore in his body aches. He regrets it, he regrets everything, and it wracks through him like an avalanche, like a tsunami, the same way a vicious gale rips the breath from a pair of unsuspecting lungs. He can barely breathe, can barely think when he looks back on the way it all unfolded, and his hands are burning and his chest is crumbling into dust—

“Enough,” he rasps out. Thunder rolls somewhere in the distance. It hits him, then, that he’s finally,  _ finally _ seeing Hashirama clearly, and that this moment belongs to them alone. Hashirama watches, and his eyes are earnest, alight with a feeling that Madara can’t place. He knows now, seeing Hashirama this close, that he would really do it—would die for Madara right here, right now, simply because Madara had asked. This isn’t a performance for the clans’ benefit; this is for nobody’s eyes but his own.

Madara’s hand nearly slips from the sweat and the ash and the blood. Hashirama blinks. Then the knife lands somewhere on the ashen ground, forgotten. All at once, the skies give out and rain pours down on them. It pounds on the ruined earth. The air comes alive with its smell. The drops run down Madara’s face, dampen his collar, wet the tangle of hair down his back. He watches Hashirama’s nostrils flare as he breathes in their freshness.

Something stirs in him, something monstrous. He shoves it away. The war is over. The war is  _ over. _

_ Get me out, _ the Susano’o says, despite all his efforts to keep it at bay.  _ I must fly. _


	2. Dream

Beyond the cliffside overlooking the valley where the bare beginnings of Hashirama’s village lie, there is another mountain. The local farmers who work the rice fields at its base don’t dare scale its slopes. They call it the Lost Woods. Ancient battles were fought there, they all say. No one remembers how, or why, by now. All they know is that when their fathers’ fathers tried to tame the mountain, the mountain fought back.

In the valley the river winds; up here it slices. It streaks along like a knife-cut, a silver sliver in the shadow of the trees, until it flows down into the rice fields and becomes tame again. _This mountain is cursed,_ the tea shop proprietor warns her visitors. Not all of them listen. In the summer it rains, and the river carves deeper and deeper into the earth, but the mountain doesn’t mind. A pocket of rainstorm always hovers just over its slopes, shrouding them away. Clouds cling to the mountainside, adhering to treetops. Most travelers turn back. Those who unwisely proceed along the mountain pass are battered in their convoys by rain and hail and wind. Most are lost forever.

But the rain is good for the rice, so the locals remain. If you visit you can take the overgrown path up from the rice fields towards the sunny side of the slope. There lies a meadow that overlooks both the newborn village to the south and the terraced platforms and slabs of sacred stone of the Uchiha hideout to the north. The meadow air is full of birdsong. And you can keep going, past whole stands of trees that have lain untouched for centuries, through thickets and around great gnarled roots that are like mountains themselves. No human machine has ever made it up this far. These trees will be no lumber of yours, will not bow to you, will not serve you. All the lumber used in the rice fields has come from elsewhere.

Then you’ll come to the hemlocks—and here the birdsong ends. It is a curious, unnerving thing to have the weight of the forest press in on you when there is no birdsong to counter it. The silence pulls heavy on your chest, floods your ears. Here the forest is darker; wilder. And there might be evidence. A scattering of jay feathers on the bare stones along the river, one day; the next, a pile of little bones strewn along the forest floor in the hemlock needles—once, a single sparrow-beak, found by the proprietor’s daughter on the wooden porch of the tea shop down between the rice fields. And then on those rare clear days you might search skyward and find a pair of the great birds themselves, two ink-dots on unbroken blue. They carve silent spirals into the sky, unbothered by the crows and ravens starting up their alarmed choruses. Gray ghosts.

They appear disarmingly inconsequential from such a distance. They glide along, the tiercel and his mate, unbothered, powerful, unreachable, otherworldly, superb—not quite the dark pointed silhouette of a peregrine, but something bigger, broader, paler. And they don’t _drift_ like the smaller hawks. They steal the wind for themselves. They have mastered it. They are too heavy, too full of _intent_ to be drawn off course. Even on the wettest, hottest summer day you can look up into the ether and smell ice in your nose; ice and hemlock and something ancient without a name, a reminder that this mountain is much older than you and much more important. But after all, isn’t it true, everybody says, that each weathered hemlock is really the soul of a person of high rank? That each one provides a sacred carapace inside which a god exists?

 _This has all happened before,_ the tea-shop proprietor says, and her visitors hold their teacups a little tighter despite the biting heat of the porcelain. They can all feel it. The hawks are restless; they know it better than anybody. The mountain needs a new host.

* * *

The Uchiha do not forgive, nor do they forget. Madara knows that better than anyone, now.

The Senju only find the Uchiha clan’s hideout after Madara tells them where to look. There’s only a small enclave of them left there by now, huddled deep in the mountains to the north of the battlefield, and Hashirama decides to send out a group of ambassadors to retrieve them while he tends to things at their temporary camp. His wood clones are everywhere, moving about outside the tent with quiet urgency—tending to the wounded, gathering supplies, building makeshift shelters. There’s too much going on. Madara’s eyes blur as he watches the world go by sideways through the gap in the canvas of the medical tent. He feels nothing. Even the pain has ebbed to a dull throb by now, the way the thunder echoes off the mountains surrounding the battlefield. He doesn’t think he hurts any less, just that he can’t feel it anymore. The clan has borne the brunt of his incompetence, for what he had hoped would be the final time.

He watches some dozen pairs of dusty sandaled feet track dark mud and blood onto the charred ground outside the tent. There go the remains of his once-proud clan, filing by his tent in stunned silence. He should feel shame. He can’t muster even a shred of it in this state. He has to cough; he forces it down, determined not to draw attention to himself. He’s not ready to face his clan. Not yet.

(Of course it doesn’t matter now, but he’s filled with fierce pride as it dawns on him that not a single one of the deserters gave the clan’s location away.)

* * *

He is seven years old and a sparrow has flown into the meeting hall and he is trying to coax her out with a tin of seeds without Tajima and Takeda noticing. He steals along the back of the hall, staying as close to the shadows as he can, and hears her frightened wingbeats as she circles the rafters before landing with a panicked whir on the windowsill. She glances about, wary. _No harm,_ he tries to convey to her. _I mean no harm. No harm…_

Tajima and Takeda are poring over a map at the head of the hall, murmuring together about battle strategy. They haven’t seen him or the sparrow yet. He doesn’t dare shake the tin and attract their attention, so he carefully withdraws one seed between two fingers and places it silently on the floor in front of him. She sees him. She flutters across the hall and the noise and the movement makes both Tajima and Takeda turn around.

Madara shrinks back against the rough wooden wall and Tajima’s eyes are scarlet and

_—Madara’s hands clench against the wood floor—_

“I’m sorry I took so long,” Hashirama is saying, and Madara comes awake with a jolt. “People kept asking me things.”

He’s still lying in the medical tent with his sandals off and blood matted in his hair. Hashirama places a long roll of bandages on the table beside Madara’s mat and sinks to his knees before him. Madara watches his movements, unable to stop his chest from rising and falling so rapidly. He feels like a wounded animal. 

“Let’s see the damage,” Hashirama says gently, opening Madara’s blood-soaked mantle partway. Madara grimaces, hating the half-groan that slips from his throat as the layer of bloody cloth slowly separates from the long gash across his chest. Hashirama pours water over it, rinsing the pieces of still-green mokuton wood from the wound, speaking in a low gentle voice as he works. “Shallow,” he says of the mokuton-gash; “missed your lung, thankfully,” of a thin sliver of green wood that he pulls from Madara’s torso; “hairline fracture,” he says, resting his fingertips on Madara’s forearm. “I can feel it.”

“So can I,” Madara says through gritted teeth.

“Sorry,” Hashirama says. “Hold still.”

Madara feels healing chakra begin to flow into his arm, and finds himself unable to stop the sigh of relief that escapes his lips.

“I gave you this one when we were kids,” Hashirama says as he works, running his fingers over the triangular dent in Madara’s shoulder, “didn’t I.”

Madara bites his lip, comforted by the familiar way that it fits between his teeth. “Yes,” he says. “Tossed me into that rock. I remember.”

A thought comes over him then, that perhaps Hashirama is healing him rather more slowly than he would under normal circumstances, and he wonders vaguely why he’s taking so long. Perhaps some of his thoughts have shown on his face, because in the next moment Hashirama looks up at him and smiles ruefully.

“Your chakra network can’t take much right now,” he says. “I don’t want to overwhelm you. I’m sorry.”

Madara’s hands itch suddenly. “Oh,” he says.

“Now, in a worst case scenario, after trauma like this,” Hashirama says, laying his palm on Madara’s bruised forearm, “the body will reject the healing altogether. I’ve got to work as slowly as possible. I can’t heal all of you at once.”

Madara frowns, curious now. “What’ll happen if you do?”

Hashirama bites his own lip. The flow of familiar chakra stops. Madara’s arm begins to ache again.

“It’s too dangerous,” Hashirama says at last, now resting one broad thumb on the inside of Madara’s wrist. His pulse thuds beneath Hashirama’s touch. “Just imagine every one of your wounds reopening at once, and the mokuton bursting out of them.”

Madara doesn’t quite know what to say to that. “Oh,” he says again. Hashirama nods grimly.

“You’re precious to me,” Hashirama says suddenly. “I’m going to take my time.”

He’s beginning to see what Hashirama means about the healing. Already his forearm is buzzing violently, as if the nerves have been cut off. When he moves his fingers, a jagged bolt of pain shoots up his arm.

“Let me do something else,” Hashirama says, and takes Madara’s gloved hand in his own. He peels back Madara’s gloves and sees the wood shards in his scabbed hands. His eyes widen.

“This isn’t my wood,” he says, and

_—Madara’s hands clench against the wood floor—_

Madara looks away. There’s a snail crawling along the tent flap, unaware of anything. Madara watches it, unfeeling. He’s at peace with this, he thinks, this resignation; this shackling himself to his grief for the rest of his life. But something nags at him in Hashirama’s presence. He wants to be taken care of, to show weakness and have it acknowledged, to be noticed and listened to and understood. The feeling frightens him.

“No,” he says at last, his voice scraping in his throat. “It isn’t.”

Hashirama gently draws his index finger over Madara’s knuckles. It drags along the splinters, just barely, like the ghost of a breath. He takes Madara’s hand in his own, lifts it closer to his face.

“Let me just…”

He retrieves a pair of tweezers from his medical pouch on the table and pours boiling water from the kettle over them. Then he gets to work. They both fall into a rhythm as the afternoon slips away outside the tent: Madara, perched on the mat, breathing in and out to the slow yet persistent pace at which Hashirama pulls out splinter after splinter; Hashirama, bent over him, brow knotted, lips pursed, hands deft. The silence is interspersed with the thin _click-click_ of the tweezers, and now and then the now-familiar tug is a little sharper than usual and

_—hands clench against the wood floor—_

He notices the pain that flashes over Madara’s face. He always notices. Madara shudders without meaning to as Hashirama’s chakra flows across his skin, more gently this time. His fingers are rough and warm. Now, of all times, he feels tears spring to his eyes, and he squeezes them shut in alarm. His stomach boils. He doesn’t dare let Hashirama see him laid bare like this—but he _wants_ to—wants to be drawn to Hashirama’s warmth the way a moth comes to a candle. He has already rent himself apart like a dying star for Hashirama to see; now the blaze is smoldering out. There’s nothing left to do now but to fade away completely.

Hashirama swabs Madara’s fists with cotton and wraps them neatly in clean cloth. “There,” he says, setting the tweezers aside, and his entire body seems to sink into the chair from relief. He closes his eyes.

Madara blurrily watches him for a while, and shame crumples his insides. That he could still want so much from Hashirama after causing so much pain and destruction—it disgusts him. But there is something else there, too, something that has burned in him since before he can remember. It’s louder now than it has been for months, since the moment Tobirama’s blade pierced Izuna’s side—a throbbing, pulsing chant: Survive. _Survive._

Madara curls in on himself. Then he lets his own eyes close and pretends the lasting sting he feels in them is from tiredness alone.

“Poppy,” Hashirama says presently, passing him a hot teacup, “for the pain.”

Madara pointedly sets it aside.

* * *

He dreams.

Hashirama plunges the kunai into his abdomen and _rips_ and his insides come spilling out onto the ash-white earth. Blood pours from his mouth in gurgling rivets and sprays and _spurts_ across Madara’s body and he can’t _move,_ can’t force his aching limbs to work and seize the kunai from Hashirama’s hands because it’s too late—

Then Hashirama is a collection of faces, masks, blank wooden ones with weeping eyes and hands like withered branches and he can’t tell which one is the real one—can’t tell where he’s gone—can’t cry out in frustration and anger and grief because now his own eyes are melting in their sockets like wax; he can feel glowing liquid pouring down his face the way lava oozes from a volcano, and indigo scales are erupting from his arms and his hands; blue flame comes alive at his feet and wings sprout from his back and he buckles under their weight—Hashirama is trapped beneath him, and he tries to shout through the wood floor, tries to reach him, to warn him, but he has no voice—

He wakes up in the medical tent with his sharingan flickering uncontrollably, searing his eye sockets. At first all he can do is cough, and cough, and _cough._ There is a hazy half-moon of light burning dead center in his field of vision, even when he squeezes his eyes shut, and his heartbeat is thundering in his ears at a relentless pace that matches the rain outside. Then a fierce pain hits him, like lightning striking just between his eyes, and he crumples into a tight ball on the mat and tries to will it away but

_—I must fly—_

* * *

His chakra pathways are still completely burnt out, Hashirama informs him that morning, peering into Madara’s eyes with intense concentration, which explains the erratic behavior of his sharingan. _Normally,_ Madara informs Hashirama back, his chakra would have replenished itself by now, and it gives him an awful pang to think that he’s still dredging up those old defensive habits of his around his friend after all this time. Yes—friend. It keeps dawning on him, over and over and over again, how improbable their situation is, how precious. It makes him dizzy.

“It’s the Susano’o,” Hashirama tells him, laying one hand on Madara’s chest. “It’s shorted out your chakra network. Not much to do but wait, I’m afraid.”

Madara scoffs at this, and then doubles over coughing. “Damn you,” he wheezes as he surfaces, because _obviously._

“I had heard the stories, but…” Hashirama looks more concerned than anything. “I didn’t realize it would be like that.”

Madara doesn’t answer. There’s a star-shaped hole in Hashirama’s chain mail, just below his sternum. He hasn’t changed clothes since the battle, Madara thinks dully.

“Is the kickback usually this intense?” Hashirama says, fiddling with a spare bit of gauze. Madara shudders, remembering the way the Susano’o had wracked through his body after Izuna died. He doesn’t know what to say.

“I…” he begins. Another lightning bolt hits between his eyes, and he has to press his palms into his eye sockets to keep the pain at bay. He counts to ten, and then to twenty. _Oh_ but his hands _itch_ under the bandages. He surfaces and Hashirama is still sitting there, rapt, with his hands folded neatly between his knees.

“I was already nearly blind when I promised Izuna I’d stop using it,” Madara says, when the pain has finally gone. “He said to fight without it, and save my eyes. Not that it matters now.”

Madara takes a long breath, and shudders as he lets it out. “It’s never…been like this before,” he says. “There’s something about it…the more I use it…it wants to be used. It wants _me_ to use it. But I…”

It scares him, he doesn’t dare say. He can’t. Not with Hashirama watching him so earnestly.

“I could help you learn to control it,” Hashirama says at once, and Madara stares at him, stares at the damage he’s inflicted—the countless burns and cuts in his chain mail, the slashes and bruises and abrasions lining his shoulders and torso, the dried blood smudged on his forehead. He doesn’t even know which one of them the blood belongs to. Once again he thinks of Hashirama’s dark guts spilling across the charred-white earth, and shudders. He clenches his fists so that his fingernails dig into his palms.

“I don’t want to use it at all.”

“I mean it,” Hashirama says again, and now his eyes are coming alight with that same gleam of ambition that Madara had seen all those years ago, when they were just two boys sitting on a cliff thinking of the future. “It might not be easy. But if anyone could do it, it’s _you,_ Madara.”

Madara’s hands itch. He gives in and scratches at the cloth bandages. “You—you don’t know what it’s like. I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”

“I heal quickly,” Hashirama insists.

“Just don’t, Hashirama,” Madara mumbles, sliding under his bedsheets. “You don’t want to be involved with this, I promise.”

He’s alone with the stabbing pains in his head for a while. Hashirama lights the cooking fire and puts the kettle on. Madara can feel his chakra tying itself in knots. He knows Hashirama is more worried than he’s letting on. _Good,_ Madara thinks. _Let him be wary. He doesn’t know what he’s getting into…_

“Holometabolism,” Hashirama says presently.

Madara stirs. “What?”

“When a caterpillar goes into its chrysalis, it sort of…it stops being a caterpillar,” Hashirama says. “It has to fall apart, all the way down to its cells, before it can put itself back together.”

Madara scratches at his bandages again, scowling. “How lucky. You’re an entomologist _and_ a medic now.”

“I’m telling you the truth!” Hashirama says earnestly. “It’s beautiful, that kind of transformation. But, I mean…I don’t want you to be that caterpillar.”

Madara chokes on a breath. He coughs. “Just what are you saying?”

“I just think…” Hashirama hesitates. “It would be worse if you kept it sealed away.”

Madara stares at the tent flap again. There’s a gray moth flying in tiny circles just outside, looking for a place to land. He thinks of the sparrow from long ago.

“Do you trust me?” Hashirama says.

Madara nods in spite of himself. He tears his eyes away from the moth. “Yes.”

“I can help you control it,” says Hashirama. “I swear it.”

He feels his face begin to crumple. He wants to be reassured again, and the thought fills him with stinging shame. He looks away. “How can you be sure?” he says.

Hashirama follows him down. He crouches by the mat, tilts his head towards him until their eyes meet again.

“Because I know you can do it,” Hashirama says, and Madara stares into his liquid-black eyes and knows that he’s telling the truth.

 _This isn’t over,_ the Susano’o tells him. 

* * *

The moon is round and heavy outside the tent. Madara watches it for a while. His eyes ache. He doesn’t dare let himself fall asleep like this. How long has it been since the battle? Two days? Three? The hours blur together in here, in this canvas box he’s confined himself to. He yearns to stretch his legs, but something stops him. He’s not ready to leave, not ready to face the rest of reality.

Whenever he closes his eyes he remembers it. He can see Izuna stagger from the blow, can feel his heart leap into his throat as he sprints to his brother’s side—then blood is soaking Izuna’s mantle, and Izuna’s fingers are clawing at Madara’s shoulder as he tries to remain upright—and something silent and unspoken passes between the three of them, he and Izuna and Hashirama, all frozen there in tandem, and they all realize in that moment that Izuna is going to die.

The candle bobs on the tray by Madara’s mat. He stares at it, unable to pull his eyes away.

“You tried to tell me,” Madara says. “You tried to make me stay. You could have healed him. But I—”

Hashirama stays silent. Madara sees his jaw clench in the candlelight.

“I went over it in my head afterwards,” Madara says, “again and again and again—if I had just—”

Hashirama is statue-still. The light flickers on his forehead. “I know,” he says, at last.

There’s nothing condescending in it. Madara looks at Hashirama, and Hashirama looks back at him, and they understand each other all over again.

* * *

He doesn’t remember his nightmare this time. One instant there’s nothing, and the next, he’s sitting upright on the mat with his heart hammering against his ribs and his head full of molten iron. For a moment he can’t remember where he is. His hands are completely numb. His eyes are burning in his skull; his hazy surroundings feel unreal, wrong. He memorizes the wood grain on the bedside table in acute detail before he realizes where he is and deactivates his sharingan.

Hashirama is asleep in the chair. Madara watches him in the half-light, taking in every contour of his face, the smoothness of his cheeks, the way the bridge of his nose flattens between his brows and his eyelashes flutter as he turns his head against the unforgiving wood. Moss is growing at his feet, spreading steadily across the dirt floor, sprouting in great patches like tiny green stars.

He can’t look away. Hashirama is dead tired. And no wonder—he’s been on his feet since before their battle, and continued to move about for days afterwards, helping everyone with—with _everything._ His chakra feels weak; every so often it spikes and flutters, stuttering like a bad heartbeat. Somehow he feels like crying again.

He does not know how he’s supposed to feel or what he’s supposed to do. This was supposed to be the _end,_ he thinks. They both had known it all along, that one of them was supposed to kill the other. He was so _close_ to having Hashirama kill him. And now—

Now—

 _Survive,_ his brain tells him again. _Survive._

“Hashirama?”

Rustling in the dark. “Yes?” comes Hashirama’s voice at once, soft and low.

“I want you to help me,” Madara says, “master the Susano’o.”

Even in the gray dimness he can see Hashirama’s eyes widen. He sits up on the mat.

For the first time since Izuna’s dying day, he almost smiles. “I don’t mean right now,” he says. “When things have settled down a bit.”

Hashirama _does_ smile at that, and it’s blinding even in the dark. “On my honor,” he says, “I will.”

Madara coughs. “Hashirama…Could you…I think I need…”

Hashirama understands immediately, just the same way he always has. He leaps up. He’s at Madara’s side a moment later with a cup of poppy milk. This time, Madara raises it to his lips.

“Drink it slowly,” Hashirama says, and something in his voice calms all the worry in Madara’s heart. He shudders as the liquid hits his tongue. Then Hashirama sits down rather heavily on his mat and lets out a sharp breath.

Madara lowers his cup, wary. “Hashirama?”

Hashirama gives him a very tired smile. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “Drink.”

Madara does. Something happens, then, and he feels himself slipping into a sort of haze. Poppies and stars, he thinks. Poppies and stars. He falls asleep watching Hashirama’s face.

He doesn’t dream.


	3. Orchard I

Madara moves through the orchard like a shadow. Hashirama is there, waiting at its center. He can feel his chakra holding in the air there, mingled in the fruit trees, like mist over a hill. Hashirama’s back is to him, and one hand rests on the trunk of a gnarled apple tree, fingers splayed over silver burls and knots. He looks unearthly in the dawn, tall and broad and statue-still. His hair is braided down his back.

He turns around as Madara approaches him. Madara almost isn’t expecting him to move.

“You came,” Hashirama says, and his face breaks into a smile.

Madara looks at his hands. “Yes,” he says. “Hard to believe this old place is still intact.”

“It’s perfect,” Hashirama says, peering up at the apples hanging from the overgrown branches above him. “Far enough away from the village and the camps—plenty of latent chakra in the ground—we should be able to make some real progress here.” He smiles. “Do you remember how we used to come here when we were kids, and steal fruit from the trees?”

Madara almost laughs. “I remember that you ate so many plums that you were sick for days afterwards.”

Hashirama hangs his head. “I had hoped you’d forgotten that part,” he says.

“It’s grown up quite a bit,” Madara says, stepping high over a tangle of brambles along the crumbling fence.

“Hasn’t it?” Hashirama says, his face alight with excitement. “Just think—we’ll be able to feed half the village with the fruit from these trees, once we get them pruned back a little.”

Madara nods vaguely. He can’t help the knot of dread that’s coiled itself in his chest. It’s been three weeks since their battle now, and all his wounds are healed. He doesn’t know what will happen when he unleashes the Susano’o again, willingly this time.

“You’ll do fine,” Hashirama says, his face so earnest that Madara, caught between embarrassed and invigorated, feels the muscles between his eyebrows relax in spite of himself. It’s as if Hashirama has read his mind. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think I could help you.”

Madara bites his lip. “Right.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” Hashirama says, stripping off his haori. Madara pulls on his gloves, braces himself. He nods. Then he hits his first obstacle of the morning. He’s put the Susano’o so far out of his mind that for a moment—his heart falters—he can’t remember how to summon it.

He closes his eyes. It’s coming back to him now. He draws the angry chakra into his chest and the thing boils around him in a fiery blue ring, singeing the ground at his feet. He looks down and observes the perfectly circular patch of blackened grass that he’s standing in, from which thin lines of smoke are rising. He falters. The sight draws his focus away from his chakra. All his anger is seeping out of him, faster with every moment. The Susano’o sputters and dies.

“Ah,” Madara says. “Sorry. Once more.”

Hashirama regards him, ever-patient and ever-watchful. Madara closes his eyes and tries again.

The second attempt is already better than the first. He can feel it. Perhaps it’s the familiar smell of smoke in his nose and mouth that does it. He exhales deep through his nose and feels the air rushing from his lungs through his nasal passages the same way that jets of fire billow from the snout of a dragon. It’s harder to summon the appropriate feelings to get the monstrous thing to leap up from the ground: he’s not in the heat of battle, nor is he destroyed by grief and rage; he is simply standing in the orchard at dawn, by Hashirama’s side, both of them at peace. He dares himself to delve back in his mind to that day they had battled, remembers ash and blood and dirt in his mouth, fire in his eyes, his grief-ravaged mind nearly rent apart. The Susano’o surges up.

This time it’s draining him quicker than he can keep it alive. He’s not—not angry enough. It’s feeding on all of his benign emotions, eating away at him, before he has a chance to replenish his strength. He needs to supply it with terror and fear and rage and grief before it dies.

He needs the sharingan, he thinks, and blinks it into being. Immediately—

_Madara’s fists clench against the wood floor—_

He almost can’t remember where he is. Then the orchard swims back into view, with Hashirama standing at its center, and the sight of his friend magnifies his resolve. The Susano’o’s fiery ribcage blazes around him. He can feel his skin humming with the power of it. It’s still nearly more effort than he can expend to keep it activated—but he’s done it, and he won’t dare let it disappear yet. Not with Hashirama watching him.

“Now pick an apple,” Hashirama says.

Madara bites his lip, nearly hard enough that blood appears. The task seems impossible. Just keeping the Susano’o alive is almost too much for him, now. Energy hums through the great ribs in a way that prickles at his focus, and he finds himself unable to persuade the massive skeletal arm to lift. He can feel pins and needles here and there, as if the arm is dead, or the nerves within it aren’t fully his own. Disappointment rises in him, cutting at his chest. It had been so easy that day on the battlefield, when he had been so full of fury, to make the Susano’o’s bidding his; so easy to employ it in his destructive rampage—so easy to kill, to make them all feel his hurt—

Madara trembles. “I—”

The word _can’t_ is perched on his lips. He catches a glimpse of Hashirama’s face through the wall of blue fire and tries to picture himself maiming that face, tearing his smile to shreds, but finds himself unable to. He had tried to that day on the battlefield, hadn’t he? And he _had_ hurt him—but Hashirama had refused to tell him how badly…

His shame causes the Susano’o to flicker mightily. For a moment he thinks he’s lost it again. But his frustration helps, for once. The arm shudders at the Susano’o’s side for a moment before it lifts away in a jerky arc across the pale sky, and Madara, straining, guides it to the tree, relying on its momentum more than anything else. Sweat drips into his eyes and he flinches. He watches its progress from below, trembling with effort, and extends two of the enormous talons towards the branches.

 _Come on,_ he thinks. _Come on._ For one nasty moment he thinks back to their final battle, and lets himself wonder again if the Susano’o’s power can be harnessed for as innocent an act as picking an apple. But millimeter by millimeter the great talons edge closer, until the apple is within reach; the next second, he is grasping it securely between two talons, in the same way a human hand might hold a pearl.

“Very good,” Hashirama says, smiling. “You’re doing fine.”

Madara nods, teeth gritted. He twists the Susano’o’s wrist, meaning to pluck the apple from its branch, but the movement is too much, and the two talons snap together, crushing the apple between them.

“Damn,” Madara grits out. Heat rises in his cheeks. Hashirama has seen the whole thing. Boiling chakra flares at his feet. Then the Susano’o explodes in a burst of blue fire, charring the trees and the brambles and blasting Hashirama off his feet. He tumbles backwards and collapses against the fence. Madara’s own knees buckle from the force of the blast, and he hits the ground gasping. Heat is rising in waves from the blackened ground; the smell of singed wood reaches his nostrils. It’s a familiar smell.

After a moment, Madara surfaces, dazed. His head is foggy. His body feels unbearably heavy, yet light as a feather at the same time. Through the haze in his brain he can see Hashirama by the edge of the orchard, unmoving.

He’s on his feet and running to Hashirama’s side before he has a chance to think. His stomach turns over. Hashirama’s braid is singed and his left arm, which he must have thrown out to break his fall, is broken. The fogginess in his head dissipates instantly at the sight. Hashirama sits up slowly, cradling his arm.

“I’m sorry,” Madara tries to say, but his voice won’t work. Hashirama turns to him and Madara notices the red scalded skin across his cheeks and forehead, where the Susano’o has burned him. Quickly he deactivates his sharingan. He doesn’t want to memorize this moment the way he had memorized their last battle.

“I’m all right,” Hashirama is saying, and indeed the burnt patches are shrinking from his face before Madara’s eyes. “I’m fine.”

Madara draws back, afraid to touch him.

“That’s…enough for now, I think,” Hashirama says, and Madara grimaces as he hears the bones in Hashirama’s arm pop back into place. He straightens his obi and bends to retrieve a small basket from beside the apple tree. “Here. I brought some food for us…a little breakfast…”

The birdsong is slowly coming back. Madara sits down hard in the grass, still shaken from the explosion, and tries to clear the doubt from his mind. He determinedly avoids Hashirama’s eyes, looks instead at the scorched ground.

Hashirama sits down heavily with his back against the apple trunk. He smiles as he removes two rice balls from the basket. He hands one to Madara, who quickly peels his gloves off. His hands are pale and sweaty underneath.

Slowly, Madara takes a bite. His appetite is a welcome change, he thinks. His body is finally catching up to his improved circumstances, now that the war is over.

“Water?” Hashirama says, offering him a canteen. He accepts. It tastes sweet—that’s not right, Madara thinks; he knows it’s just regular water. But somehow the air and the water and the grass and the orchard all feel sweeter than usual, today. He looks up, finds himself memorizing the shape that the leaves make against the sky as he eats. The sun is coming up. Great golden beams of it fall across the orchard, brightening the fruit-studded branches above his head. Madara frowns. Hashirama has replenished the burnt leaves without Madara even noticing. He’s astounded at Hashirama’s ability to effortlessly create, ashamed that all he can do is destroy—though, he thinks ruefully, now he struggles to do even that.

“You fixed the trees,” Madara says, feeling very foolish as he speaks.

Hashirama looks up, and smiles.

“My chakra is always in the land,” he says. A ray of sunlight falls across his face. “It’s always flowing back and forth between me and the earth.”

Madara frowns, considering. “Then you could grow, say, food?” he says, thinking of the Uchiha clan during the war. “Whenever you wanted? As much as you wanted?”

Hashirama regards him, bites the inside of his cheek. “I could, but, well…”

He places his hand on the apple trunk, runs his fingers over the silver wood. An apple swells under his palm. Madara watches as its green skin blushes yellow, then rose, and then finally a deep red.

Hashirama twists it off the trunk, tosses it to him. “See for yourself,” he says.

Madara holds it to his lips. He takes a bite and grimaces. It’s completely tasteless. “Oh,” he says, passing it back to Hashirama. He stares at the bite mark as the apple reaches Hashirama’s palm. There’s something intimate about it being there, in a way that he can’t put his finger on.

“It’s not just the taste,” Hashirama says. “If I use it too much, I’ll deplete all the nutrients from the soil and turn the land barren. It’s not sustainable, especially now. We’ve been at war for so long that the land needs time to heal on its own. I can’t do it all myself.”

“Oh,” Madara says again, thinking of great mokuton braids coiling over the charred earth where they had battled.

“But we can—” Hashirama twirls the apple in his hands “—do _this,”_ he says, and at once the fruit melts back into his skin. The amount of chakra doesn’t change; Madara knows the apple is still there, somehow, just that it’s been converted to flesh and blood, or whatever Hashirama is made of.

He places his broad palm on the wood. A white flurry of an apple blossom bursts straight from the tree trunk.

“There,” Hashirama says. “Now it’ll grow normally.”

Madara stares at the trunk, then at Hashirama’s hand. He opens his mouth.

“I feel like…”

 _Everything is sweeter now that you’re here._ It sounds stupid, even in his head. He doesn’t finish the thought, just retreats back to the abandoned compound and indulges himself.

But he had meant it, he thinks, staring idly at the windowsill after he’s finished. The sheets are all strewn to one side. Lazy afternoon sunlight pours through the dusty window slats, turning scattered motes into glowing sparks. The room smells of sweat and sex. Everything is sweeter now. Even the days last longer, the fruits are riper, life is easy and good. He can’t help but wonder how long it will last.

* * *

To Madara, it seems as if the village springs up overnight. Hashirama clasps his hands together and creates rows of houses and shops at a breathtaking pace, and where there were only small collections of tents one day, new clusters of simple wooden buildings stand in their place the next.

“Like living in a tinderbox,” Madara remarks one morning, watching Hashirama grow a tall rectangular building out of the ground.

“Mind that you don’t set all our hard work ablaze,” Hashirama says with an easy smile, nudging him in the shoulder. Madara shoves him back, naturally, and to his surprise Hashirama tumbles to the ground from the impact.

“Oh dear,” he says, slowly standing up from the dirt. “Caught me off balance.”

“You didn’t overtax yourself, making all those houses?” Madara says, watching Hashirama brush dirt off his knees. Hashirama grins at him.

“Maybe you’re just that strong,” Hashirama says roguishly, “knocking me off my feet like that. Besides, building was the easy part.” He lays his hand on Madara’s shoulder. “Now we have to make it all work.”

* * *

Hashirama is his friend and it’s convenient, he thinks. He doesn’t have to imagine the feeling of some stranger’s hands on him in order to assuage his newfound needs. He knows Hashirama’s hands by heart. How could he not, by now. Again he thinks of the way his gloved hand had stopped Hashirama’s knife that day, the way he had crushed Hashirama’s fingers against his own.

In bed, he runs those same fingers along his upper lip, lets them drag ever-so-slightly on his skin, and tries to not think of what he’s doing as a betrayal.

* * *

The moon waxes and wanes again before Madara manages to make any significant progress with the Susano’o. But there is still a feeling of great progress in the air: the mornings are bright and jewel-blue, full of chattering swallows and the water-whistle-sound of warblers in the woods; in the afternoons, they rest in the shade atop the cliffside and admire the newly-painted roofs from above—scarlet, for the academy; blue, for the aviary and the hospital; and a hundred others in sunny yellow, forest-green, and pale violet. Laundry dances in the breeze, rather than the battle flags of past seasons, and cicadas hum lazily in the trees, as if they have all the time in the world. At dusk, they return to the orchard and prune unruly branches and tangled brambles until the sun sets.

With the Susano’o training in the mornings, followed by long days of work, Madara falls into bed each night exhausted and sore. The Susano’o, feeble as it is when he summons it in Hashirama’s presence, still siphons his energy away at an alarming pace, and makes his joints ache and his sharingan pulse in his skull to the point where he can barely sleep some nights from the pain. Still there is the sense of progress in the air, and every night as he falls into bed that pounding refrain rings loud and clear in his brain— _survive,_ it says _. Survive._

On the morning when he finally manages to control the Susano’o, the orchard is full of mist and ravens are making a racket in the mountains beyond. Hashirama’s chakra is like a blanket over him, like the mist covering the ground and turning the fruit trees into pale silhouettes. He can look up and see the Susano’o disappearing in the mist, despite its fiery body casting a bluish glow over the whole orchard. It calms him, even with the toll the Susano’o still takes on his body. He feels more in control of it than he has ever felt before, with Hashirama by his side.

“That’s it,” Hashirama says, his feet planted firmly on the ground, hands clasped as he sends slender mokuton tendrils spiraling up the Susano’o’s arms to steady them. Hashirama’s chakra is like a salve, solace, _safety,_ and he detects it with perfect clarity despite the Susano’o’s incessant thrumming in his ears. “You’re doing fine.”

Madara holds the apple between two great talons, sweat pouring down his face, spots blinking in front of his eyes. Then he twists the enormous wrist, teeth gritted, muscles on fire, and plucks the apple from its branch, perfectly intact.

Madara gasps with relief. Immediately his chakra stabilizes, and some of the tension vanishes from his body, now that he’s merely holding the Susano’o steady rather than manipulating its finer movements. The spots in his vision begin to clear. He looks to Hashirama, and finds that his friend is gaping up at the Susano’o with his eyes wide and his mouth falling open, tracing the outline of its enormous body until he loses its shape in the mist.

“Amazing,” Hashirama murmurs. “Absolutely amazing.” He stretches his arm out towards the massive ribcage, his face still full of wonder and awe. Madara can see the blue light reflected in his irises, casting a soft glow on his chin and lips, and the expression on his face makes Madara want to believe that the Susano’o is an amazing thing indeed, if Hashirama can stand to look at it like that.

* * *

Sunlight streams into the orchard after they’re finished. “Catch,” Madara says, and tosses a plum in Hashirama’s direction. Hashirama fumbles, and dives to the ground after it. He surfaces, grinning as he wipes the dirt off.

“The orchard has come along so nicely,” Hashirama says, gesturing with his plum at the now neatly-pruned fruit trees. He gives the apple sapling beside him a shrewd look. “Though it seems that this one sends up two watersprouts for every one I prune off.” He kneels at the base of the trunk. “Eager to grow taller, are you?” He smiles. “I understand completely.” He gestures behind him with his thumb as he straightens up. “Teenagers,” he says, shaking his head.

Madara laughs. “If you get any taller, you might become a tree yourself,” he says.

Hashirama shudders. “That sounds terrible,” he says. “No sake, only water.”

Birdsong fills the orchard as they eat. Hashirama manages to sit so still that a dragonfly lands on his nose.

“I nearly forgot,” says Hashirama, biting into his plum. The dragonfly zips off. “One of the daimyō of the Land of Fire has requested an audience with us.”

Madara selects another plum from the basket. “Really?”

“Yes,” Hashirama says. “I think the meeting is set for next week. He’s personally invited us to his palace. Can you imagine it—shinobi and nation on equal footing at last?”

“It almost sounds too good to be true,” Madara says. “It’s like a dream.”

“It _all_ sounds too good to be true,” Hashirama says, laughing. “Every day I wake up and I have to remind myself that it’s all real.”

Madara watches a katydid jump from wildflower to wildflower and tries to imagine what he could have possibly done to deserve this.

* * *

(Later in bed he fingers slip between his thighs; his mouth is red and open and hot. His lips part as he remembers. _Amazing,_ Hashirama had said, _absolutely amazing.)_

* * *

Madara approaches Takeda after the weekly clan meeting, dreading the encounter. He can barely stand to gather the clan together at all. Today’s meeting was no different from all the other meetings he’s called since the truce: too sparse; too formal.

“You wanted to speak to me?” he asks Takeda, once everyone else has left the tent.

Takeda smiles like a lynx. “Indeed,” he says. “What business could the Naka River daimyō possibly have with the _esteemed_ Uchiha and Senju leaders?”

Madara folds his arms over his chest. He hasn’t the faintest idea what the daimyō wants—probably another shiny artifact. “As you no longer occupy the position of my chief strategist, I feel no need to relay that information to you,” he says.

Takeda smiles grimly. “You don’t trust me?”

“No, I don’t,” Madara says darkly. “I should think you’d know that by now.”

Takeda’s eyebrows shoot up. “The feeling is mutual,” he scoffs, “ _boy._ ”

“If that’s all you wanted,” Madara says, turning to leave.

“Your little suicide mission cost us, you know,” Takeda calls after him. “You try anything like that again, and I will take the mantle for myself, I promise you. Plenty of the clan will follow me.”

Madara stops in his tracks.

“Just as they followed me to the Senju clan’s encampment, when you refused to come out and face us,” Takeda continues. “It’s been clear to me for some time now that you are unfit to lead our clan. Others are catching on as well.”

“I—I did what I had to do,” says Madara. Panic is quickly replacing the anger seething in his insides. “I kept us from starving. I brought us renown.”

“You drove us to despair,” Takeda says. “You have brought nothing but misfortune upon our clan, over and over again. Better to bide our time among the Senju and leave you to rot than to let our noble clan suffer another minute under your leadership.”

A flutter of inadequacy tugs at his chest. Not for the first time, he considers giving up the mantle on the spot. Then he imagines the look on Hashirama’s face when he finds out that Madara has abandoned his clan to Takeda, and presses on.

Madara balls his fists in his pockets. “There is nothing _noble_ in scavenging for scraps,” he says. “There is nothing noble in robbing bodies for trinkets, in fighting vagabonds’ battles for a shot at dignity—”

“Better scavenging for scraps than kowtowing to the enemy,” Takeda says.

 _“Former_ enemy,” Madara interjects pointedly, but Takeda does not look convinced. “As your leader, I insist—” 

“Leader— _ha!”_ Takeda shouts. “You stopped being that, if you ever were one, the moment you abandoned us on the battlefield—”

Madara feels white-hot dread in his throat. “I—”

“—left us at the Senju’s mercy—”

“That’s—”

Takeda is spitting mad now. “—Neglected your clan in order to barricade yourself in your room with a corpse,” he finishes, his sharingan flickering on.

Madara bites his lip and draws blood. He feels his own sharingan spin into life, boiling in his eye sockets. The thought of Izuna is like a knife in his ribs; Takeda’s taunts are ringing uncontrollably in his ears as if he had bellowed them. He knows he is shaking with barely-contained rage; worse, he knows Takeda is exactly right—

His chakra flickers across the tent in a great pulse, blowing his and Takeda’s hair back from their faces.

_Get me out—get me out—I must fly—_

He can feel the Susano’o boiling up of its own accord for the first time since that day on the battlefield. His mantle is smoking at the collar. He squeezes his eyes shut, tries to force his chakra back down. But it’s useless. He can feel his weeks of progress unraveling before him like old bandages covering old wounds—he wants nothing more than to catch Takeda’s head between two enormous fiery talons, to crush it the way he had crushed that apple, weeks ago now, consequences be damned—he wants to tear his limbs apart—wants him dead— _dead—_

“Is that all?” Madara says, surprised at the calmness in his voice.

“Actually, I have one more piece of advice for you,” Takeda says. “When you meet, I believe the daimyō will make you a little offer…I suggest you take it.”

And he stalks from the tent, leaving Madara in his singed clothes to his frantic thoughts.

* * *

They are drinking on Hashirama’s porch the next evening, watching the sunset turn into dusk.

“I don’t ever want summer to end,” Hashirama says, taking a long sip from his cup.

“It’s only June,” Madara says, laughing.

“I know,” says Hashirama, “and it’s lovely. Being here with you, I…”

He trails off, a little aimlessly. A chorus of frogs begin singing somewhere out in the forest, and they both smile.

“This stuff is good,” Hashirama says suddenly, gesturing to the bottle beside him on the table. “The plum flavor is nice. You like plum wine, right, Madara?”

“Pour me one,” Madara says. Hashirama leans in close and refills Madara’s cup. Madara can smell the plums on his breath. He takes a sip. Hashirama is watching him intently, clearly waiting for his assessment.

“It’s good warm,” Madara says, nodding. “Really brings out the flavor.”

“It’s just like you said, all those years ago,” Hashirama says. “It may have taken a while, but we’re really drinking together.” He raises his cup. “To seeing each other’s guts.”

Madara regards him over the rim of his own cup. “I’d say I came a little _too_ close to seeing your guts, Hashirama.”

Hashirama’s head hits the table, so hard that the wood cracks from the impact. “I know,” he groans. He surfaces, looking much more serious. “And I meant it,” he says. “You know I will do anything you ask of me, Madara. Anything.”

“Don’t be so stupid,” Madara snaps. “You were _supposed_ to take the third option, you know.”

Hashirama frowns. He sets down his cup. Madara can almost see his brain working furiously behind his eyes.

“Kill _you?”_ he bursts out, once he’s worked out what Madara had meant. “I—I couldn’t, I could never—” 

Madara laughs humorlessly. “All that time, during the war, I’d hoped that you would.”

Hashirama looks affronted. “You can’t say that!”

“Better you than anyone else,” Madara says. “Not that it matters now.” The sake has made him bold. He leans in towards Hashirama, puts his narrow hand on top of Hashirama’s broad one. “Don’t ever do that again,” he says. “You’re the only family I have left.”

Hashirama stares at him, his mouth slack, a strand of hair stuck to his cheek, and Madara is hit with an incredible fondness for his friend.

“What about the clan?” Hashirama says finally, his sake forgotten.

Madara scoffs. “Not anymore,” he says. He drains his cup and pours another. “Can’t blame them. Hikaku is distant. Kagami won’t look at me. Takeda—”

He stops, remembering Takeda’s words from earlier that day. They still sting. He lifts his cup to his lips, but this time sets it down without drinking from it. A cloud moves across the moon.

“He hates me,” Madara says.

Hashirama purses his lips. “I don’t think anyone could hate you, Madara—”

“Don’t get me wrong; I’m used to being hated. I expect it, truthfully. I hate him too,” Madara says. He takes a drink and slams his cup down. “He’s always wanted the mantle; that was never a secret. But I’ve always thought he had set his sights on more than the Uchiha clan had to offer.”

Hashirama peers at him as he refills his own cup. “Why do you keep him around, then?”

“He’s clever,” Madara says. “Like my father was.” He runs his finger along the rim of his cup. “Tajima and Takeda drew up all the battle plans, and I was their weapon.”

Hashirama laces his fingers together, frowning. His cheeks are pink. A pair of owls start up a racket in the woods behind them.

Madara scoffs. “Killing,” he says, “that’s all I’ve ever been good for. Ever since I was a kid. And nothing’s changed…”

Hashirama is watching him intently.

“When I use the Susano’o,” he begins. He hesitates.

Hashirama unclasps his hands and places them in his lap. “What is it?” he says.

Madara looks rather helplessly towards the moon. A bat flies across it as he watches. “It’s like it—”

“What?” Hashirama says, quietly.

Madara winces. He isn’t sure, now, if he should have said anything at all.

“It’s like it has a mind of its own,” he says, pushing on against his better judgment. “No matter how hard I try…I can’t control it sometimes.”

Hashirama’s frown deepens. “How so?”

Madara thinks for a moment, tapping his finger on the table. The sake has made his head cloudy. “It embodies destruction,” he says. “It mirrors the user’s desire to destroy utterly any enemies in their way. It’s like it grabs hold of my feelings and—and—”

There is a long pause.

“Hashirama,” Madara says. “If the Susano’o can’t be harnessed for good—if it turns out I can’t control it—will you promise that you’ll kill me?”

Hashirama considers him, frowning. He opens his mouth, closes it again. Madara watches his face; watches the firelight flickering on his skin, the lines deepening between his eyebrows, the way his lips twist and his throat bobs as he swallows.

“The Susano’o—I know it can be used for good,” Hashirama says, and Madara can hear a note of pleading in his voice. “I _know_ it. It’ll just take some time.” Hashirama plays with his cup for a moment. His lips part. He looks up, and stares Madara straight in the eye.

“You aren’t just good for killing, Madara.”

Madara wants to believe him, but finds that he can’t. He remembers the tasteless apple; remembers knocking Hashirama to the ground with only the slightest effort.

“How badly did you let me hurt you,” he says carefully, staring into his cup, “the day that we battled?”

Hashirama laughs, but there’s an edge to it that Madara rarely hears. “Oh,” he says. “Don’t worry about that. I healed quickly.”

“Right,” Madara says. “That’s…I’m glad.”

They both become engrossed in their sake for a while.

“I’m sorry,” Madara says, staring at the reflection of the night sky in his cup. He looks up. “I’m so sorry, Hashirama.”

Hashirama smiles, a little sadly this time. “So am I.”

He doesn’t know exactly what makes him say it—perhaps it’s the sake, or the fact that he’s already bared himself to Hashirama over and over tonight—but he poses the question, his voice somehow still level and even, before he has a chance to think:

“What on earth would make a man like you put up with a man like me?”

Hashirama regards him, his eyes wide and his face alight with the look of boyish earnestness that Madara knows so well, as if he expects Madara to already know the answer. But Hashirama has overestimated him once again. Madara doesn’t know, and he turns back to his sake cup in silence.

“I know what you’re going through,” Hashirama says suddenly. “I know how—how isolating it can feel, to have a power like this foisted upon you. How much it can hurt.” He gives a rueful smile. “But this time with you—it’s precious.”

A cool breeze wafts across the porch. Madara shivers. He lifts his still-warm cup to his lips again and holds it there.

“I almost gave up a few times,” Hashirama admits, “during the war. I’m so glad I didn’t, to be able to drink with you now.”

Madara can feel his face softening. He smiles, a little woozily. “Here’s to not giving up,” he says, and raises his cup.

“It’s so nice to see you smile,” Hashirama says, and they both drink.

Now, of all times, his embarrassment over his private habits is catching up to him all at once. He can feel his face turning red as he drains his cup. He thinks back to the dozens of evenings that he’s spent imagining Hashirama’s hands on him, for no other reason than that it was easy. Hashirama would probably balk at the idea if he knew. Madara shoves the thought from his mind.

He stumbles home and touches himself anyway.

* * *

He dreams that he is falling through a forest without birdsong, dropping through layers of canopy and undergrowth until he is sinking into the earth. Above him he can still see starlight, and he has half a mind to throw out his arms and clasp onto something, anything, to break his fall—but his arms are not his own, nor are they human…he looks up at the faraway sky, and finds himself staring up through a ring of blue fire—

Then the familiar smell of forest floor fills his nostrils, a cocktail of decomposing leaves and fungi and damp earth. He knows he has had this dream before. He crawls over dark roots, searching for something, knowing somehow that he’s approaching his quarry. Ferns and mosses part for him as he staggers along; lichens and brambles shrink back from his talons as he grasps for something in the distance, something lost to him that he cannot seem to find, even as he draws closer to it…

At the center of the forest is a tree that reaches the stars. He approaches it, knowing he is unworthy to stand in its presence, and looks up at the wooden mask hanging against the trunk, enraptured by the beauty of its features, more perfect than any object carved by human hands—but its dark mouth is open in an agonized scream and its blank eyes are turned to the starry firmament in supplication…

He holds his breath. Then he reaches up with trembling talons and lifts the wooden mask from the trunk, knowing he must see what the mask is covering—but there is nothing underneath, no indication that a face has ever been there at all. He falls to the ground in despair.

Then the Susano’o’s wings unfurl from his back, in such excruciating detail that he’s sure for a moment that this is more than a dream. Something dark and cloying is pouring from the mask’s eyes. He can feel it covering his hands, the warm slickness of it—some kind of lifeblood, like fruit that has rotted but is still deceptively sweet, dripping down the trunk and pooling on the ground around him.

The Susano’o roars to life, larger than he’s ever seen it, and he can feel his chakra spiking out of his control, to the point where it no longer feels like his own—lightning-blue scales are bursting from his skin—his talons grow to the size of stalactites—he’s taller than any mountain—he owns the sky—

* * *

He wakes to Hashirama rapping furiously on his bedroom window.

“Something’s happened,” Hashirama says, breathless, once Madara has let him in.

Madara blinks, still bleary. The awful persistent ache in his bones is stronger than usual today, and it fills him with a nagging dread. “What?”

“I don’t know,” Hashirama admits, “but come quickly.”

The sight awaiting them halfway across the Uchiha district is a grisly one. Takeda Uchiha lies slain in his bed with his throat slit and blood soaking the sheets.

Tobirama and Hashirama share a grim look; then Tobirama kneels to examine the body. Madara watches him, at a complete loss for what to do or say. A thousand thoughts race through his mind. He must alert the clan— _talons made of blue fire_ —but, _oh,_ but he doesn’t dare face the clan after this— _scales bursting through his back_ —the Susano’o is out of his control; he knows it now— _the air is heavy;_ _a storm is coming—_ it will act on his impulses with or without his consent— _I must fly—_ his guilt nearly overwhelms him, and he feels like he might vomit— 

“First blood spilt in the new village,” Hashirama says, sadly.

The words hang wide open in the space between them. _And not the last,_ Madara thinks, through the haze in his brain.

His blood is roaring in his ears. “I have to go,” he says.

* * *

The orchard is quiet.

He tries to summon the Susano’o, but it won’t come. He has to be angry, he thinks. Of course—he already knows this. His impotence confirms it. He sinks to the ground, numb, and curls his hands into the ragged grass. The air around him is soft and sweet.

He doesn’t want to kill; doesn’t want anyone else to die. He’s been killing for so long, he thinks, long before he had a choice, before he knew what he was doing. He never had a chance, he thinks. His fate was sealed the moment he was born into the Uchiha clan.

A skinny tree at the edge of the orchard catches his eye. He frowns. He remembers a day long ago, when he and Hashirama had crept undetected into this same overgrown orchard and eaten their stolen fruit and tossed their plum pits over the fence, unthinking. Years, decades have passed since then.

He approaches the tree, hesitant. It’s one that they had planted; he’s sure of it now. In their boyhood carelessness they had created life. He marvels. It’s as tall as he is, and lanky like Hashirama was at fourteen; it lists slightly to one side, but the plums hanging from its branches are as dark and soft as the ones they had eaten that day, so long ago. Then he looks closer and sees the long split down its trunk, and the burn scars on its bark from when he had accidentally blasted it with the Susano’o, that Hashirama hadn’t managed to heal.

Madara kneels at the broken trunk. Tears spring to his eyes. “I never meant to hurt you,” he whispers.

He balls his fists, lets his fingernails bite into his palms. It stings. He thinks of his father, and of Takeda. Then he thinks of their newborn village, so fresh and clean, with this bloodshed now staining its short history. Finally he lets himself entertain the notion that he had avoided since the day the he clasped Hashirama’s hand in his own and stopped his knife. If he is doomed to be a monster, then perhaps he does not belong in the village at all.

 _Survive,_ the thing in his brain tells him once again, despite everything. _Survive._

**Author's Note:**

> I run a madara rp blog @gaishuisshoku on tumblr (or @armorsleevedsinglehit for ooc content). come say hi!


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